Finally Day of the Dead

There were two absolutely must-experience events in Mexico for me, and they fell on consecutive weekends.

Four years ago I had arranged my round-the-world schedule to allow me to be in Mexico for Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. On the day I had taken a road trip into Copper Canyon in the north, where we saw one kid trick-or-treating and a lot of heavily-armed police, and nothing more.

So as with Cervantino I was determined to do it right this time. No matter how many hours I had to spend in transit.

Day of the Dead is a millennia-old tradition in Mexico. It was adopted by the Aztecs and later mixed with Catholicism. The essential idea has always remained the same though; that on one day of the year the spirits of the dead can return to earth, and that they need to be welcomed, attracted and guided with offerings. Today November 1 is known as the Day of the Innocents, when the souls of children return to their families, and November 2 as Day of the Dead, when everyone else returns. The hours leading up to these days are the most active part of the festivities, as graves are cleaned and prepared in the hours before midnight, and the arrival of the spirits.

Although every region has its own approach to Day of the Dead (such as ignoring it in Copper Canyon), some images are ubiquitous. Mexico is festooned with (decorative) skulls at the best of the times, but in the lead up to Day of the Dead skulls and calaveras (skeleton figures) appear everywhere. Market stalls are stacked high with colourful chocolate or sugar skulls. Pan de Muerto, or sugar-coated bread is everywhere (and is sorely missed as soon as Day of the Dead passes).

One of the best known Day of the Dead celebrations takes place on Janitzio, an island which might seem kind of Mediterranean, with its mess of twisting alleys and slope-hugging houses, if it wasn’t isolated in a reedy lake in highland Mexico. This entire region (Michoacan state) was at the heart of colonial Mexico, and is strewn with enormous churches brooding over tiny villages. The people of this region were never subdued by the Aztecs, preserving their own language and traditions, which are still remembered and practiced today.

Arrived in the village of Uruapan just after rain had doused the prepared altars, preventing candles from lighting and drenching the flower arrangements, leaving the town square awash in limp Marigold petals. By morning though, new altars were being assembled. I had assumed this was a tradition most keenly observed by the venerable old folk of the town, but the town plaza was full of teams of teenagers, arranging flowers, laying out food and drink offerings, colouring and sculpting sand, lighting candles, rigging the wooden lattices that serve as portals for the dead. Marigolds are the flower of choice for Day of the Dead, good for luring wayward souls. Petals were heaped and scattered over the altars. The flowers are infectiously bright; how can anyone not be cheerful when surrounded by so much colour?

Moved on to Patzcuaro, towards the heart of Day of the Dead. Previously a the heart of the Tarascan state and later an important colonial centre, Patzcuaro today seems to serve no other purpose than as a jumble of well-preserved and restored colonial buildings, studded with churches and plazas. The entire town had been taken over by street markets, food stalls and alfresco cafes. The hippies had descended in force, mingling with the local artisans to sell their wares. The fancy gringos reclined at shaded outdoor seating. The earnest photographers stopped traffic, capturing every angles, nook and corner of the city. Merchandise and paraphernalia were everywhere, hokey t-shirts and elaborate calavera figures, wrought crucifixes and candied skulls.

It was all just a prelude to Janitzio though, or whatever I had built Janitzio up into. Brochures and guide books spoke of traditional butterfly boats and candlelit processions across the water to the island, but these would have been hopelessly ineffective. This was a serious tourist event, and the lake resembled a multi-lane highway of boats, overtaking one another as they shuttled the endless stream of people to and from the island.

Undoubtedly something has been lost in the popularisation of Day of the Dead. The island itself was flooded with people. Every house and building had become a restaurant or souvenir shop. Alongside the relevant souvenirs were the ubiquitous tit-shaped mugs, the naked elf pin-ups, the bongs and psychedelic mushrooms. Like much in the region, Janitzio stays afloat through tourism. This was not a once-a-year market; this is Janitzio. Enough souvenirs to last for decades were accumulated in the narrow alleys and passageways.

Still, there was something about the island. The restaurants festooned with flowers and colours, the steep, crooked streets, the reedy waterways, the men paddling their boats, bringing their nets home as a full moon turned the lake to silver.

The hordes of people pitched leaning tents all over the island and began demolishing its ample beer supplies. They bought wooly hats to ward off the famous cold of the lake and hunkered over fried fish stalls. And then they – we – all descended on the cemetery.

Janitzio’s cemetery, cut into the side of one of the cliffs, and looking out over the waters towards the lights of Patzcuaro, is genuinely tiny. An arch at each end admitted the constant stream of visitors, and between the arches the graves were arranged in a ragged patchwork which left no space for walking, or setting up your monster lens on its tripod. It was very apparent for very early on that no matter how grand the island’s reputation, it was going to be swamped by visitors, and that there would be no hiding from this.

Reading accounts of years past, it sounded like people pilgrimed in from far and wide to attend to the graves of departed family members. It sounded like a vigil was kept by every grave, and that the festivities were foremost for those remembering the dead and only afterwards for the tourists. This certainly has changed. There must be those of the island community that feel imprisoned by Day of the Dead. During the festivity that become cooks and waiters and bar staff, salespeople and hustlers. Children carry jack-o-lanterns through the crowds, asking for money and posing obediently while photographers position them correctly. Those that can come to the cemetery must jostle to reach their plots. They must ask people to stop using their flashes and must ward off the drunk and the clumsy. Once they have arranged their altars they must sit silently and be photographed, or try to pray and sing over all the clamour.

Still still still, there is something extraordinary about Day of the Dead on Janitzio. I spent hours in the cemetery, arriving while it was still empty enough to feel alone in, and staying until it was impossible to move without bustling through other people and disrupting carefully arranged photos.

Some of those that arrived to clean up the graves and prepare altars arrived as a clan, bringing their marigolded scaffolds with them, and their many offerings and candles and their incense and their blankets. Others arrived silently and were barely seen, and planted re-used candles around tiny graves, sweeping away the grit and disappearing quickly. Some arrived in mid-conversation and were jovial and casual. Some arrived with solemnity. Some arrived and left alone.

When I arrived there were flowers upon graves and a few candles already lit against the darkening sky. By the time I left there were covered baskets of bread, and tall candles flickering throughout the cemetery, and many huddled forms crouched around graves keeping their vigils through the night. When cameras flashed the white light made the cemetery look ghoulish, but when they stopped the warmth of the candles and the flowers enriched the darkness but also brought an intimacy to the graves.

I spent a long time alone with three candles. They were each surrounded by a pile of stones and set over unmarked graves. When the candles guttered out they were not re-lit. They made me cry. Each dignified candle lit to help a lost soul find its way home, each flame lit by hands that needed to express that life without you was so much harder, each tiny light a yearning to be with you again, a prayer for togetherness.

The poignancy of the night, and of the candles that multiplied into the darkness, so that as the night grew deeper the cemetery grew brighter, was enhanced in a twisted way by the crowds. There was something beautiful in the old ladies sitting alone by the graves, in the old man singing tunelessly over the chatter. While these took place within the clamour, and among the camera flashes though, they assumed a greater gravity. There were thousands of people in the tiny cemetery, but these ladies wrapped in their blankets still sat utterly alone by cold, blue graves, lighting candles and remembering. To be alone in a crowd of such volume is not easy. Especially when the crowd is taking your photo again and again. That the rituals and vigils continue, that it is worth rebuilding toppled rock walls and sweeping away the bootprints, that it is worth scattering petals that will be trampled, and lighting candles that will be lost in the pallor of flash photography, says something of the faith and desire at the heart of Day of the Dead. That these people can still muster their dignity while drunks stumble over century-old graves and piss in the dark corners of the cemetery speaks of resilience, and slow-burning passion.

It was strange to me, to surround myself with a festival essentially about missing people. I choose to miss everyone by moving on and being always-leaving. I decide, every time I change location, that it is worthwhile to miss people if it means finding something new. I don’t have much concept of real yearning, of missing something unrecoverable. I choose to miss the people that matter. Those that light candles in the cemetery remember people that are irreplaceable, that they would never choose to live without. How can I explain how I choose to live? How can I ever feel lonely when I have chosen to be so? I have never been the one left behind, to keep vigil over a trampled grave.

So finally, despite what Day of the Dead has become, there is something profound here, something that swallows up the absurd crowds. As more candles were lit and the old man raised his tuneless song over the cemetery, and as the bell shuddered into the night, there was hush over the cemetery, or as much hush as a crowd of thousands can muster. Whatever communing with the dead takes place, and whatever need to commune with the dead drives this whole tradition, they are bigger and older and more patient than whatever crowds might quickly come and quickly go.

 

 

 

 

Finally Cervantino

There was no question; I was going to Cervantino. It was destiny or something.

Four years ago, flitting about the world with amigo Andy, we arrived in a catatonic Guanajuato the day after the Cervantino festival (named after Cervantes, author of Don Quixote) had finished. Not just any Cervantino though; that year marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote. The biggest Cervantino there could ever be and we were twelve hours late. Since that fateful day Cervantino had been a kind of grail for me; we errants have to have our quests and delusions and Dulcineas.

So when I arrived in Mexico it was clear that destiny was going to be played out, and that I would be going to Cervantino. It was so clear and I so convicted that I didn’t both to arrange accommodation or transport; I just kept telling people that I was going to Cervantino, I was going to Cervantino.

The festival couldn’t have come at a better time. Guadalajara was getting cold. The sun rose every morning looking like a spent apocalypse. It was grading season at school. I couldn’t find a housemate. I needed to get the shit out of Guadalajara.

So I did, Quixote style, full of hot air and daft notions and with no idea what I was doing. And it took hours and hours and hours of wheezing public transport. It was after midnight when I bumbled and clattered my way through the front door of a last-minute couchsurfer’s house in Guanajuato. But the brutal commute didn’t matter in the slightest; I was at Cervantino, and Guanajuato was already working its magic.

What is it about Guanajuato? It is an impractical town; all bent and twisted streets strewn about a highland valley. There are no straight roads, not logical way from A to B. It is a student city, an artsy city. The buildings are painted in bright block colours, every crooked plaza has its fountain, has its cafe, has it market stall and street food. It is a city of layers, the subterranean tunnels and byways, the colonnial streets, the narrow balconies, the university and church towers, the crests of the hills and El Pipila, the ridgetop monument that serves as the city’s compass.

Cervantino had started more than a week before I arrived, and had settled into an easy festival rhythm. In the blue morning streets mountains of beer, soda and water were being piled outside every cafe and bar. Tortillas were frying and tamales were steaming. Crumpled forms lay among their bottles and backpacks in the plazas. Dazed couples huddled together in the sunlight. Accommodation of the affordable variety is in very short supply; last minute fliers were being stapled to any surface not already festooned with banners.

For a lot of people the day would contain more hours of waiting than of festivaling, but as the day progressed the streets, the university steps, the plazas and cafes all began to fill. The theme of Cervantino ‘09 was the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope, and the free films and exhibitions reflected this. Fizzing light bulbs hovering in darkness, deep space photography, nebulous abstractions in paint. The cinemas, the auditoriums, the museums and exhibition crawlspaces all filled with people. The families, the visiting artists, the couples and those that had actually booked tickets to events all savoured the offerings of the city.

It is for the night, and for the booze and the carouse that most people come to Cervantino though, and as the city turned dusky the flow of people increased until the main streets were all seething. But bacchanalia is not an official part of the Cervantino schedule; every night it must start of its own accord. The crowd of guys demanding kisses from passing gals, the breakdancers, the medievalists, the Quixote impersonator and his clanging, menacing spurs; they got the party started, trampling the no drinking in public ordinance. In their wake came the musicians, mimes and fire twirlers, and then there were competing strains of music echoing out of every plaza. The dancing began, and the staggering, and the groping, and the conga lines and the late night mayonnaise-drenched elote.

And as the rain began to fall one of the many many mariachi bands started a march through the street, and was joined by the thousands, and they converged on one of the arbitrary plazas, and still the people were pouring off buses and out of taxis and into the streets, last minute arrivals from anywhere, with no place to sleep and no way to keep dry.

The following morning was already my last morning, the streets were cool and wet but the sky was achingly blue. All-night figures sprawled in the parks and discreet tents had been pitched in grassy corners. There were many hanging head held in many hands. There were the last lingering fondlings of one night stands. And there were more people arriving, and fresh bands were shining their instruments, and the tortillas were frying and the beer was being delivered and it was all one endless carouse, all so fittingly hopelessly spectacularly quixotic.

And I had been to Cervantino.

A night with the Virgin

Aside from being Columbus Day, October 12 is also one of the most important days on Guadalajara’s calendar. On this day La Generala (the little General), also known as Our Lady of Expectation or the Virgin of Zapopan makes her annual pilgrimage from the cathedral in the heart of Guadalajara to her own basilica out in Zapopan (a city long swallowed by the sprawl of Guadalajara, and one of the wealthiest in Mexico).

Millions of people attend the procession every year, shutting the city down and suffocating the streets. This particular virgin is one of the most beloved in Mexico, with a swathe of miraculous interventions attributed to her. Festivities commence on the night of the 11th and continue right throughout the following day (although longtime Guadalajara residents murmur that the event is not as elaborate or as well attended as it once was).

I banded together with other couchsurfers and we brewed thick Oaxacan coffee and wrapped ourselves in layers, steeling ourselves for the long night ahead. A jolt of caffeine and some long sleeves weren’t going to be nearly enough though. The serious revellers, most from the outlying barrios of Guadalajara, had swarmed into the city centre taking over the parks and plazas and patios, turning the city into an enormous slumber party. This was how you prepared for the procession; by staking your place, laying out the blankets, and sleeping through the cold hours of the mid-night, until the virgin finally stepped forth from the cathedral, beginning her journey home.

Even aside from the thousands of inert forms packed under the arcades and around the monuments and into the flowerbeds, this was a very strange celebration. When the coffee proved ineffectual we bundled into one of the street cafes, switching to beer. We were virtually the only people drinking. Beer generally requires no pretext, but here was the biggest pretext on the Guadalajara calendar, and yet… the diminutive virgin must be truly loved, or feared, or both. Under the stern, benevolent gaze of their lady the revellers were proving that you don’t need alcohol to have fun; you can have just as much fun with multiple stages playing hokey Christian rock.

As the hours until the emergence of the virgin slunk by, more and more traditional groups converged on the cathedral. They had danced for hours and they would dance for hours more, waiting for their lady to emerge so they can shepherd her and be shepherded by her as they pilgrimaged the streets.

These dance groups were a mash of cultures. Headdressed injuns with bison on their shields stomped down the main streets. Ranks of cowled and masked men clamoured before the cathedral in their demented beat-iron tap shoes. Aztecs beat furious drums and dervished around each other. Solitary whip-crackers prowled between the groups and looked certain to put someone’s eye out with those things. Every groups had their protector ghouls, garbed in vampire-inquisitor robes and sporting the most obscenely fantastic face masks. They kept no time as they stomped among the dancers, but kept the crowd in order and posed for photos.

A steady torrent of people surged through the cathedral to pay their respects to their lady. Whole dance groups crashed through, still playing their music and drowning out the robed men at the front who were trying to raise a hymn. I have no idea how the dancers kept it up. As the caffeine exhausted itself the virgin still looked firmly ensconced in her church; she would not be moving for hours. Rather than join the slumber party we retired to rather more discreet beds and abodes. People were still trickling into the centre as they left. They were all sobre. She really is just that powerful.

Choose your Hero: Miguel Hidalgo and September 16

The first national holiday wheeled around, landing on a Wednesday, breaking up school as it broke up the thunderstorms that had been skulking about for days.

September 16 is Independence Day in Mexico. On the preceding day at school we had corralled the kids into the central patio for a flag ceremony, involving marching and saluting and the withering eye of the school director. Long strips of the Mexican red and white and green covered the city. Sombrero pedlars had been dragging their carts about the city for weeks.

On the eve of the 16th people gather in plazas all over Mexico, and at 11pm commemorate the cry of liberty. In Mexico City’s monster Zocalo the president leads the cry, and is echoed by cries of Viva! from thousands and thousands of throats. He vivas liberty, he vivas the heroes and martyrs of Mexican independence, and last and most emphatically he vivas Mexico itself, again and again, accompanied by the roar of his people. Then the bell ringing and fireworks commence.

All that shouting and bellringing is intended as a kind of grand re-enactment of Miguel Hidalgo’s first cry of liberty. In 1810 on the night of the 15th Hidalgo stood outside his parish church and decried the colonial Spanish government, declaring death to the Spaniards and the birth of a new and egalitarian Mexico.

Less than a year later, though, Hidalgo had been captured, executed, dismembered and exhibited. Independence from Spain was still ten years away for Mexico. A number of other figureheads for the revolution arose; virtually all of them were at some point exiled from Mexico. Many were executed during or after the war.

So why Hidalgo? Why celebrate the beginning of the war of independence and not the end of it? Next year Mexico will celebrate its bicentenary, again basing the date on Hidalgo’s cry for freedom and not on the actual advent of Mexican independence. Bolivia did the same thing earlier this year, leapfrogging all its neighbours by counting its anniversary from the beginning of its struggle, not the end of it.

Perhaps the reason is that Agustin de Iturbide, who you could say ended the war of independence, was not the radical that Hidalgo was; he became the first emperor of Mexico, his new country representing little of the equality that Hidalgo had envisioned (Iturbide was also executed).

Perhaps by dying early in the struggle Hidalgo evaded the fate of Iturbide, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Porfirio Diaz, all of whom started as military heroes and ended up as deposed tyrants. Hidalgo started the war but didn’t have to finish it, didn’t have to stitch together an awkward harmony out of the disparate elements of the independence movement. He didn’t have to govern; he was already dead and popular.

Perhaps Hidalgo’s charisma and personality are what have immortalised him. An errant priest who read French enlightenment texts, spoke indigenous languages and fathered two children, Hidalgo exemplified all of the quirks that a hero of the people could need.

Whatever the reason, the hero has been chosen, and his cry has been immortalised with a national holiday. The holiday should fall on the 15th, but the date too has been chosen; the 15th was already booked for the aforementioned Porfirio Diaz’s birthday (which is no longer significant). Figures like Diaz rise and fall but Hidalgo remains forever the hero of the independence he never knew.

Sucre celebrates two hundred years of ‘independence’

For as long as I have been in Sucre the city has been fixated on its impending bicentennial. On May 25^th the city would celebrate what the giant posters festooning the churches and plazas have advertised as the two hundredth anniversary of the ‘first cry of freedom in the Americas’. In preparation for this grand date the central plaza was fenced off for three months so that its perfectly fine paving could be uprooted and replaced. Buildings all over town were obscured by scaffolding as fresh coats of paint were thrown at every slightly off-white edifice. Other stranger changes occurred; previously blank and chaotic roads received confusing lane markings and other arcane symbols; bright orange trash cans appeared in every street; on the eve of the bicentennial electronic walk/don’t walk signs appeared around the central plaza, twittering and flashing conflicting signals and bewildering the locals.

The bicentennial was to be Sucre’s finest hour; which other South American city could boast of having electronic cross walk signs? Along with everything else, in the lead-up to May the city was bedecked in flags. Bolivian flags hung from balconies in every street, and with them hung the provincial flag – a barbed and medieval red cross on a white field. It was in Sucre in 1809 that Bolivia – then known as ‘Upper Peru’ and little more than a mineral-rich territory caught in the crossfire of the Lima vs. Buenos Aires rivalry – first declared independence. It would take another sixteen years to actually achieve independence.

A sort of historic sleight of hand is involved in this claim to the first cry of freedom in the Americas. By 1809 the American Revolution had already taken place, Haiti had gained independence and early independence movements had already risen (and fallen) in Venezuela. Still, claiming 1809 as the anniversary allows Bolivia to leapfrog all its South American neighbours, whose bicentennaries all fall between 2009 and 2025. Where Bolivia should be the last to celebrate its independence, it has become the first.

The weeks leading up to May 25^th were a jumble of concerts at shifting venues, food fairs and semi-celebrity sightings. The Ms. Bolivia contestants arrived en masse, all of them about two feet taller than the average Bolivian. There was a Ms. for every city and province, and one from the phantom Litoral province, which Bolivia lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific over a hundred years ago. I’m not sure who she was or where she actually came from, but she looked too frail to reclaim the province she was representing. Ms. Chuquisaca (Sucre’s province) unsurprisingly won the title of Ms Bolivia, and Sucre was firmly back in the spotlight. It may have lost two of the three branches of government, it may have very few significant industries or businesses (apart from a cement factory that sponsored many of the celebrations), it may no longer be at the fore of progressive American thought, but Sucre had Ms. Bolivia, and it had the bicentennial.

The celebrity Bolivian most conspicuously absent from the bicentennial was polarising president Evo Morales. He made an appearance at Ravelo, a town close to but not within the boundaries of Chuquisaca, before returning to fortress La Paz. Sucre’s days as one of the progressive centres of the Americas are well and truly over. Nowadays conservatism characterises this city of lawyers and dentists. When Evo was elected the idea of an indigenous president, especially one fixated on reform and wealth redistribution, sat very uncomfortably with Sucre’s white and wealthy. As Evo has shifted power away from Sucre (official capital) and to La Paz (de facto capital), he has earned the ire of not just the elite, but just about every one in Sucre. The hot-blooded spirit of independence no longer means Sucre wants freedom from oppressive colonial powers, but rather from the most radical president in Bolivia’s history (that’s not to say he isn’t at times oppressive…). When those red crossed flags waved and fluttered, they were declaring as much as anything that this was Sucre, not Bolivia.

Officially Evo was boycotting the bicentennial, because one year ago racist thugs in Sucre had beat up indigenous people attending May 25^th celebrations. The real reason is more likely that Evo is so hated here that had he turned up, the violence would have repeated, albeit on a much larger scale. As it was, the long long bicentennial weekend was largely peaceful, all the aggression being worked out in long processions of furious flag-waving.

Bolivia is a nation of marchers and music-lovers, and all its festivities are characterised by these activities. At all hours in the days before the bicentennial, groups would take to the streets, keeping loose time with their drums and horns, chanting their slogans and waving their flags. Representatives from the outlying barrios made the many-kilometered dance-march in full and elaborate costume, flinging fireworks about them. Military bands in elaborate regalia were more formal and subdued. For the first time since I have been here, skirts became common sights on the streets of Sucre, as any woman with a pair of legs was wrapped in one and given a banner to hold.

Among the concerts, the flourishes of amateur fireworks and the endless processions, the highlight of the festivities came on sleepy Sunday morning. Sucre is usually at its most catatonic at this time, but on this particular morning the city awoke to the sound of many many drums and voices. The city was being invaded by campesinos, country-folk of predominantly indigenous heritage. Thousands upon thousands of them marched into town, bearing their banners and their instruments. There were a few red crosses in the crowd, but far more prevalent were the three-coloured flag of Bolivia and the rainbow forty-nine chequers of the indigenous flag. The marchers shouted pro-Evo messages, held placards declaring ‘no to racism’, and cheered for Bolivia (rather than for Sucre) while the sleepy Sucreñas looked on in disbelief. Would this end in violence? It would not; it was a show of strength and unity by the people that had been brutalised one year before. They filled the streets, occupied the central plaza, and then melted away to let the dazed city folk get on with their suddenly miniscule-seeming processions.

By the Monday of the actual bicentennial the celebrations were losing momentum. The midnight ban on alcohol that temporarily came into force with the beginning of the 25^th may have had something to do with this. Still, fireworks were launched, and an enactment of the cry of freedom was enthusiastically followed on the steps of the house in which Bolivian independence was finally ratified in 1825.

Concerts continued to break out from time to time in the ensuing days, but by the 26^th the bicentennial had passed and Sucre was once again its tranquil self. The whole long march to the 25^th had gone off with barely a violent incident. My favourite images from the celebrations come courtesy of some clever or careless vendor who instead of red crosses sold red heart balloons, which hovered over the passionate crowds wherever they gathered around the city.